Comparing and Contrasting the Syntactical Structures in the English and Albanian Variants of the Harry Potter Saga

Abstract

Whenever the issue of translation is raised, the term equivalence is taken into consideration. Becoming an essential feature of translation theories since the 1960s, equivalence was meant to indicate that source text and target text share some kind of “sameness”. The degree of sameness gave birth to different kinds of equivalence, namely lexical, grammatical and cultural ones. Considering that language systems differ from one-another, we cannot assume that lexical and grammatical structures of both source and target language will be identical. On the contrary, it is the meaning and preservation of style which take precedence. The present study aims to observe the similarities and differences in syntactical structures between English and Albanian language traced in the first three Harry Potter novels, written by the British author J. K. Rowling and translated into Albanian by the distinguished translator Amik Kasoruho. Firstly, the translation strategies introduced by the most prominent scholars of translation theory will be explained. These strategies will then constitute the theoretical basis of syntactical and comparative analysis, which will compare and contrast both the source and target texts at the phrase level. Finally, conclusions will be drawn regarding the similarities and differences in the illustrations taken out from the corpus.